I have noticed an increasing use of the word “accident” in your news articles and editorials. I do not know whether your increasingly frequent misuse of this word is the result of laziness or the product of ignorance on the part of your writers. Whatever the cause, it should stop.

A vehicular accident is not an accident when it’s a crash. That’s just about all the time, as proclaimed by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in an official declaration published in 1997.

Almost all the time, collisions involving cars or trucks and motorcycles and bicycles and pedestrians occur because of some stupid move by one of the participants.

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I say “participants” because the word “victims” implies the same sort of blamelessness that infuses the word “accident”.

For instance, a few years ago, a collision occurred between two Corvettes whose drivers were racing each other along a curvy stretch of two-lane road at about 2 a.m. As I recall, one driver was killed and the other severely injured. Does this incident rise to the realm of “accident,” an unforeseen event that might be termed an act of god?

It’s more like an act of sheer human stupidity.

I’d suggest the two drivers involved were not victims but casualties of their own puerility. Of course, they’re deserving of respectful and comprehensive treatment for their resultant conditions, but that does not diminish the total idiocy of their actions. To describe this incident as a horrible accident involving two victims would imply a divinity controlling events who’s even more unthinkingly impulsive than these two nitwits.

To substitute the word “casualties” to describe these drivers is equally inappropriate. Such a designation not only misapplies the word, it insults the memory of every wounded or killed member of the armed services throughout history.